Meet the Maker of Unicorns A-labs Advisory & Finance, with a staggering 46 times ROI performance for their investors in the past 24 months and nearly unparalleled value creation for their client companies, is an emergent new-age investment bank that blazes a trail for a completely new way of banking
By John Stanly
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The words "involvement" and "hands on advisory" are common within the VC community. It is a standard part of any pitch given by a VC to startup companies they seek to reel-in. But somehow, said promises of active involvement remain short of the actual promise and left wondering about more within the realms of back-seat advisory and a rather "hands-off" approach.
These words take a completely new meaning with A-Labs Advisory & Finance. A dynamic new investment bank that has earned its global stage spotlight with a few remarkable deals that set new records on and off Wall Street.
The A-labs website claims that "Unicorns are Made… Not Born". They state that nurturing unicorns and helping them "become' is what A-Labs is all about. Well, this unique approach requires significant involvement and a lot of real hands-on work. An intimate knowledge of the company, its team, its strength, and weaknesses. The key challenge is performing a gap-analysis showing the distance between where the company is at its current stage and its future unicorn potential, and then executing on closing these gaps.
The A-Labs team has proven to stand behind these words. The young bankers astounded Wall Street last year with Nanox Imaging (NASDAQ:NNOX) taking the company from a $60 million startup to a $1 billion unicorn within 14 months and raising a total of $260 million (including a pre-IPO round) with a 16x over-subscription of $1.65 billion. This deal happened while everyone who is anyone on Wall Street said it cannot be done. "They' said that pre-revenues and pre-FDA medical device companies were never floated on NASDAQ at more than $170 million market cap. A-Labs were adamant that this barrier is fictional and proven the Street they can do what others believe to be impossible.
Same story has happened with INX Limited. A company that dared to dream of an SEC / FINRA regulated crypto exchange and an SEC approved public offering of digital tokens. Top industry experts stated – again - that this cannot be done, that the regulatory and accounting hurdles are too high and that a small company from Gibraltar will not be the first to break this barrier.
But INX took A-Labs as part of their founding team and as their bankers, and the A-Labs team probably did not hear the skepticism. Four years later, A-Labs has achieved the impossible. Together with the company's management team and founders, A-Labs has delivered on the world's first SEC cleared $85 million digital asset IPO under a public offering with an F-1 prospectus filing, giving a historical birth to a completely new asset class (that may replace equity shares altogether) and established the world's first fully regulated crypto and security tokens exchange.
In both Nanox and INX, A-Labs was a complete hands-on advisor and acted as a full partner in strategy, board decisions and actual execution of the business plan. From branding to business model and product design, A-Labs team undertook the position of an extension of their clients' management teams.
A-Labs claim that this is their secret sauce - right there – in this intimate involvement and real hands-on execution approach. They claim that this is what makes the impossible possible, when they work not "for' their clients but "with' them, side by side across all aspects of the business.
A-Labs have in-house sales, business development, branding, graphics, marketing, HR, project management, product design, IT, PR, Investors Relations and even interior office design consultants – all for the benefit of their clients. A-Labs has even established its own fund for pre-IPO and mezzanine finance that serves exclusively their clients.
With a definitive performance track record and a few unicorns already behind them, A-Labs is probably the new breed of bankers that finally redefines the meaning of active, hands-on involvement with portfolio companies.
